Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I'm sure you're not alone, particularly with your first book. Conventional wisdom seems to be that it is virtually impossible to get acceptable results doing it yourself. Based on my very limited experience I tend to agree with this. Yet is is no solution to say hire someone when you simply can't. There were certainly some good suggestions made here for helping you to do it yourself, though I certainly doubt my own ability to perform such a task effectively.
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There are two main problems: not seeing, and not knowing.
It's a near-universal experience to not see your own errors, particularly when you're close to the work. One thing that can help is to put it aside for weeks/months, then check it again. Another is to get text-to-speech to read it aloud to you. Another is to do multiple very specific editing passes: one looking for homophone errors, one looking for its/it's errors, etc etc etc. Before doing this, it pays to try to identify your own major error areas so you can focus on them.
The second issue is not knowing, and that's even harder to address, because it can take years to really fully learn English grammar and put it into practice if there are large holes in your education. But these words are the tools of your trade: misusing them doesn't inspire confidence in those you're asking to pay you for your work. The work that needs to be put in is worth it. Anyone who thinks it isn't has chosen the wrong line of work.
Lastly, another thing you can do - once you've put in the work on the 'not knowing' issue - is to try to find a critique partner or critique group to help improve your work. But in general that sort of exchange is not for the basic mechanics of writing, it's for the bigger story-telling and craft stuff.